This is the second in a two-part series about what Trump's return to the White House and Kash Patel's appointment as the next director of the FBI means for the agency's ongoing efforts to disrupt accelerationist terror plots. Read Part 1 here.

In August 2019, a 21-year-old white man named Patrick Crusius drove 650 miles to El Paso, Texas, walked into a Walmart with a rifle and opened fire, killing 23 people in an attack that deliberately targeted Hispanics.

The El Paso massacre made 2019 the deadliest year for domestic violent extremism since 1995, when Timothy McVeigh bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

Crusius clearly stated in a manifesto that his attack was “a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas,” using language that directly echoed President Donald Trump’s claim during the 2018 mid-term elections describing a migrant caravan as “an invasion.”

ALSO READ: Going to come after you': Inside Kash Patel's 'lawfare' suit against ex-Pence official

So devastating was the attack that Trump, not typically one to acknowledge right-wing extremism, was compelled to tell the nation during an address from the Diplomatic Reception Room at the White House: “In one voice, our nation must condemn racism, bigotry, and white supremacy.”

The president added: “We must shine a light on the dark recesses of the internet and stop mass murders before they start.”

Beyond the president’s words, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security — the two federal agencies most responsible for addressing domestic terrorism — seemed to get serious about white supremacist violence.

Mixed record on handling white supremacist terror

The Department of Homeland Security’s Strategic Framework for Countering Terrorism and Targeted Violence, released in September 2019, observed that “white supremacist violent extremism… is one of the most potent forces driving domestic terrorism,” while noting that deaths caused by domestic terrorists had eclipsed those caused by foreign terrorist organizations such as ISIS and al-Qaeda.

Five days before a Second Amendment rally in Richmond, Va. in January 2020 that received President Trump’s endorsement, the FBI arrested three men in Maryland who were members of the Base, an accelerationist group that promoted insurrectionary violence as a first step towards creating a whites-only homeland. According to court documents, the three men, who included a Canadian national, acquired 150 rounds of ammunition and trained at a Maryland gun range.

While planning to attend the Richmond rally, two of the men allegedly discussed conducting ambushes against police officers and unsuspecting civilians. One of them mused that “Virginia can spiral out to f---ing full-blown civil war,” while another fantasized that “if there’s like a po-po cruiser parked on the street and he doesn’t have a backup, I can execute him at a whim and just take his stuff.”

The three men eventually pled guilty to federal firearms charges and received sentences ranging from five to nine years in prison.

But the decisive manner in which the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security moved to combat violent extremism during the final years of his Trump’s first administration gives some reason for cautious optimism that they’ll be able to continue to do that work during the next administration — even as the president-elect pours rhetorical fuel on the fire.

Cynthia Miller-Idriss, director of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab at American University, told Raw Story that the federal government’s pivot towards addressing the threat of white supremacist terrorism under the first Trump administration suggests that it is still viewed as a “bipartisan national security issue.”

“No matter what party they’re in, no president wants to see a massive terrorist attack on their watch,” she said.

Others are not so sure the field agents devoted to disrupting accelerationist terror plots will remain unscathed by politicization of the bureau.

Jon Lewis, a research fellow at the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, told Raw Story that it’s a safe bet that agents involved in the investigation into Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election will face the most intense scrutiny.

“But we’re fooling ourselves if we think that’s where it stops,” he added.

While the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security ramped up their efforts to disrupt violent white supremacists in 2019 and 2020, the final two years of the first Trump administration also showed how domestic terrorism could be politicized.

Elizabeth Neuman, who served as assistant secretary for threat prevention and security policy at the Department of Homeland Security, has said that officials in the Trump administration didn’t want to use the term “domestic terrorism” after the 2019 El Paso massacre. But when left-wing protests, some of which turned violent, erupted in response to the police murder of George Floyd in May 2020, then-Attorney General William Barr said: “The violence instigated and carried out by antifa and other similar groups in connection with the rioting is domestic terrorism and will be treated accordingly.”

Assuming Trump carries through on his promise to initiate widescale deportations when he takes office in January, Lewis said the response from federal law enforcement will bear scrutiny.

“At a strategic level, the concern would be around resourcing if there’s a massive shift away from the domestic [terrorism] desks and a reprioritization to anarchists or environmental activists, where every left-wing threat against an ICE facility was viewed as terrorism,” Lewis said.

Despite clear evidence of the persistent threat of white supremacist violence and the FBI’s track record of aggressively disrupting terror plots over the past five years, it remains to be seen whether Trump will continue to support the agency’s counterterrorism focus when he returns to the White House.

Trump said little or nothing during the 2024 campaign about whether he views white supremacist domestic terrorism as a problem. Meanwhile, he and his allies have obsessively focused on their grievances against FBI investigations targeting Trump and supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

The Trump transition team and Kash Patel, whom the president-elect announced will lead the FBI, did not return messages for this story.

The emergence of Terrorgram

The white supremacist domestic terror threat didn’t end when the FBI dismantled the Base in 2020, or, for that matter, when Trump left the White House in January 2021. The El Paso massacre and an earlier, even deadlier attack — when a 28-year-old Australian national named Brenton Tarrant gunned down 51 Muslim worshipers in Christchurch, New Zealand in March 2019 — exemplified the kind of terror plots the FBI would scramble to disrupt during the Biden era.

The new threat would come not from groups, but from lone actors loosely networked through the internet and goaded into action by online propaganda.

The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security officially acknowledged accelerationism as a driver of domestic terrorism for the first time in May 2021.

“Themes like ‘gamification’ and ‘accelerationism’ partly inspired some of the attacks in 2019 and will likely continue to inspire future plots,” the two agencies said in their jointly issued Strategic Intelligence Assessment and Data on Domestic Terrorism document. “Widely disseminated propaganda on online forums and encrypted chat applications that espouse similar themes regarding kill counts could inspire future attackers to mobilize faster or attempt increasingly lethal and more sophisticated attacks.”

The assessment included a definition of accelerationism: “a belief among some neo-Nazi and/or fascist RMVEs that the current system is irreparable, without apparent political solutions, and hence violent action is needed to precipitate societal collapse and start a race war.”

Fears among counterterrorism officials about recurring white supremacist violence driven by online propaganda and obsession with “kill counts” turned out to be warranted.

In May 2022, 18-year-old Payton Gendron drove three and a half hours from his home in Conklin, N.Y. and walked into a grocery store on the east of Buffalo, where he opened fire and killed 10 people, almost all of them African Americans. Gendron issued a manifesto that cited Tarrant as an inspiration.

The pattern would repeat more than a year later, in August 2023, when a 21-year-old man named Ryan Palmeter fatally shot three Black people at a Dollar Store in Jacksonville, Fla. Palmeter, like Gendron, praised Tarrant as an exemplar.

Following the Buffalo massacre, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security would observe “a significant shift in some of the [racially and ethnically motivated violent extremists’] coordinated efforts to spread overtly violent and racist propaganda within encrypted chat applications, specifically to encourage others to engage in violence.”

The online propaganda referenced in the agencies’ most recent joint assessment appears to be the Terrorgram Collective, a loose network that produces and distributes digital publications that provide detailed instructions for carrying out mass shootings and energy grid attacks, while extolling racist mass murderers as “saints.”

Dallas Erin Humber and Matthew Robert Allison, the two alleged leaders of Terrorgram, were arrested in September 2024 and charged with multiple felonies, including conspiracy and soliciting hate crimes, which could garner each of them up to 220 years in prison.

For every Payton Gendron who successfully carries out a lethal mass shooting, there are likely a dozen more plots targeting African Americans, Jews, Muslims and LGBTQ+ people that the FBI disrupts — almost always by using informants.

The FBI has demonstrated an increasingly “nuanced understanding of the threat” posed by neo-Nazi accelerationists, Lewis, the research fellow at the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, told Raw Story.

“These agents have their finger on the pulse, no question,” he said.

The FBI arrested Kyle Christopher Benton, a 26-year-old resident of Snohomish, Wash. on Sept. 6 for illegal possession of a machine gun. According to the government, Benton had been arrested for domestic violence while serving in the U.S. Army in 2019. Witnesses interviewed for that case revealed that Benton expressed admiration for Tarrant and talked about a fantasy of getting in a shootout with federal law enforcement agents. He had also allegedly “communicated with another person about the idea of killing a homeless person to see how it would feel.”

For years, the government said, Benton had expressed support for accelerationism, and in 2021 he told an informant that he supported an initiative to create a white ethno-state in the Pacific Northwest. When Gendron opened fire in the Tops supermarket in Buffalo, Benton allegedly told an acquaintance in a private Instagram message: “Today has been another glorious entry into the annals of Aryan Terror. The harder the jew system presses back, the more the Aryan Will shall be unleashed to wreak havoc and death upon the hordes of our racial and spiritual adversaries.”

In August 2024, according to the government, Benton posted on the encrypted app Telegram that he was “going into random chats and hyping up saints," adding that he "might get some weirdo to become a saint because he knows people will love him.” Around the same time, the government said, Benton posted a video of himself firing a fully automatic firearm.

The Benton case illustrates the dilemma faced by FBI agents who are answering the charge given by then-President Trump in 2019 to “stop mass murders before they start.”

“There’s no charge for a neo-Nazi who’s talking about committing a mass shooting or taking overt steps to carry out a mass shooting,” Lewis told Raw Story. “Until he’s at the synagogue door, there are precious few options for the FBI other than the low-level charges like possessing an illegal machine gun.

“That’s just to take them off the playing field,” Lewis continued. “When you look at how these cases evolve, you’ve certainly seen the FBI responding to the conditions as they are — the legal conditions and the conditions on the ground.”

No matter how stark the evidence, if law enforcement makes an arrest before and not after the attack, the question of whether the violence is an actual plot or just someone’s fevered imagination often comes down to the discretion of a federal judge.

Noah Edwin Anthony, a 23-year-old soldier, was stopped during a random vehicle inspection while entering Fort Liberty in North Carolina in March 2022. Military police found a ghost gun, ammunition and a patch with an American flag altered to display a Nazi swastika in place of the stars.

Later, when police searched Anthony’s barracks, they discovered a military-style operational document entitled “Top Secret Goebbels” that described a “premeditated plan to physically remove as many of the” Black, Hispanic and mixed-race people from the four counties surrounding Fort Liberty “by whatever means need be.”

The document outlined a litany of methods, including ricin poisoning, arson and shooting, while naming “minority businesses, meeting places and neighborhoods” as targets.

“There are members of the government that believe that but for the actions of that gate guard at Fort Liberty, we could have very well seen a mass casualty event in the Eastern District of North Carolina,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Gabriel Diaz told the court during Anthony’s sentencing in March 2024.

Diaz argued that a prison sentence of three years and four months was necessary to deter violence and protect the public.

But when Anthony stood before the judge, he received only 18 months — the lowest sentence in the guideline range.

“My job is to protect the public from further crime by the defendant,” Judge Richard E. Myers II, who was appointed to the federal bench by President Trump, told Anthony. “If Mr. Diaz is right that there is a genuine risk going forward, then shame be on this judge. Right? If you go out and hurt somebody, I have failed. And believe me, I think about that.”

This is the second in a two-part series about what Trump's return to the White House and Kash Patel's appointment as the next director of the FBI mean for the agencies ongoing efforts to disrupt accelerationist terror plots.. Read Part 1 here.

Kash Patel, the MAGA loyalist named by President-elect Donald Trump to lead the FBI, has financially backed a lawsuit against former Trump administration official derided as a “RINO” that raises questions about how he would wield power as head of the nation’s preeminent law enforcement agency.

Richard Grenell, who served as acting director of national intelligence during the first Trump administration, has confirmed in a court filing that the Kash Patel Legal Offense Trust (now known as the Kash Foundation) contributed $7,500 to support his defamation lawsuit against Olivia Troye, a former counterterrorism advisor to Vice President Mike Pence.

Grenell’s lawsuit, which is currently pending in federal court, alleges that Troye defamed him posting a reply on Twitter (now X). Troye’s tweet, a reply to Rep. Ted Lieu (R-CA) stated that prior to serving as acting director of national intelligence, Grenell, as ambassador to Germany, “tried to get Mike Pence to attend a white supremacist gathering.”

The German news outlet Der Spiegel has reported that members of the far-right party Alternative for Germany posed with Grenell at the U.S. Embassy’s Fourth of July party. The German courts have upheld a designation by the country’s domestic intelligence agency to place the party under surveillance for suspected extremism.

ALSO READ: Trump allies promise revenge as Dems ram through Biden judges

Troye testified in a deposition for the case that Stephanie Dobitsch, who served in the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis, told her that Grenell “tried to get Pence to meet with Nazis.” Troye also testified that Dobitsch told her that Pence did not attend the gathering. Dobitsch appears to have given the same account to Brian Murphy, who also worked in the Office of Intelligence and Analysis, based on a statement by Murphy that was submitted to the court by Troye.

Murphy wrote that during a 2020 conversation with Dobitsch, she told him that Grenell had advised her during a meeting in advance of Pence’s visit to Berlin that “the vice president should meet with a German civil society group.” Murphy said Dobitsch told him that she went to the group’s office to vet them and concluded that the “group Grenell suggested was a far-right extremist group… similar to a neo-Nazi organization,” and that she advised “that meeting with the group Grenell suggested would be a political disaster for the vice president.”

Patel announced the lawsuit against Troye on his Fight With Kash website in August 2022 in an article headlined, “Fight With Kash & Ric Grenell file defamation suit against fired deep state employee.”

He also posted on Truth Social at the time: “Today, “FightWithKash.com and @grenell took decisive action against the deep state and fake news mafia.”

Jesse Binnall, who represents Grenell in the lawsuit, is listed as a member of the board of directors for the Kash Foundation on its 2023 990 report.

Patel announced the filing of Grenell's defamation lawsuit against Troye on Truth Social in August 2022.Federal courts

In a motion to dismiss filed in federal court in May, Troye argued that the lawsuit, with Patel’s financial backing, is part of a “lawfare MAGA campaign to silence critics.” The lawsuit, she said, is intended by Grenell and his lawyers “to silence and punish those who criticize them and other MAGA luminaries.”

In another filing, Troye described the suit as “a political stunt at its heart to stifle criticism and cause perceived opponents to incur legal fees so that they would shy away from further comments.”

Reached by phone, Binnall acknowledged questions from Raw Story and said he would confer with Grenell, but the two men did not respond in time for publication.

Grenell, who was reportedly a final candidate for the secretary of state position before being passed over in favor of Sen. Marco Rubio, hailed Patel’s nomination on Instagram on Sunday. Grenell referred to Patel, who worked under him at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, as “my brother from another mother.”

Former acting director of national intelligence Richard Grenell congratulated Kash Patel on his appointment to lead the FBI in an Instagram post on Sunday.Instagram screengrab

Patel has made no secret of his desire to enact retribution against Trump’s perceived political opponents.

“We will go and find the conspirators — not just in government, but in the media,” he told Steve Bannon, the former White House chief strategist, in 2023. “Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens to help Joe Biden rig presidential elections. We’re going to come after you, whether it’s criminally or civilly.”

In an interview with Raw Story, Troye warned that Patel could use his position as FBI director to carry out vendettas against anyone who runs afoul of Trump, including Republicans.

“There’s nothing to stop him from making up bogus charges and doing frivolous investigations,” she said. “And then the question is — it’s going to fall on the workforce to stand against things that they know are not legal or viable. But how long will that workforce be able to hold the line? Do I have faith in law enforcement and the integrity of many of these people who serve in these roles? Yes. However, depending on how many people they go in and fire, lawfully or unlawfully, just how many people fall in line remains to be seen.”

Patel could not be immediately reached for comment for this story.

Troye added that the combination of Patel and Pam Bondi, whom Trump has named to serve as attorney general, “is very dangerous because she could provide top cover for Patel to carry out some of these things.”

NOW READ: Will Trump back the FBI’s battle against domestic extremists? He won’t say.

Alex Jones, the notorious conspiracy-monger and MAGA propagandist, announced on his Election Day show that it was “doomsday for the globalists.” But he warned his listeners to be on the lookout for false flag attacks calculated to try to spoil candidate Donald Trump’s victory.

“And now, we’re beginning to see the signs,” Jones said. “But this, too, will fail. No one’s gonna buy it.”

His voice dripping with mockery, Jones said: “And then we’ve got the white supremacist — handled and run by the FBI, they built him the bomb, controlled him, were his leaders, they admit in the arrest documents and the press release.

“They’ve been telling you, ‘Oh, the white supremacist Trump supporters are going to blow up the power stations.’ Boom,” Jones continued. “Or do they just say it enough and loons go, ‘Oh yeah that’s a good idea!’ I mean, either way, they’re putting it out there.”

Law enforcement agents arrested 24-year-old Skyler Philippi on Nov. 2 as he powered up a drone and prepared to attach explosives to it while sitting in the back of an SUV. He had been planning to fly the drone into a nearby electrical substation in Nashville, Tenn., according to a federal complaint.

A drifter who had bounced from his hometown in Minnesota to the New Hampshire woods, and then to a Nazi “hate house” in Louisville, Ky., Philippi was living in Middle Tennessee by the summer of 2024. By then, according to the charging document, Philippi was talking to an FBI informant to whom he had confided that he wanted to commit a mass shooting at a YMCA.

This person put Philippi in contact with a second informant who lived close enough so that the two could meet in person. According to the charging document, Philippi mentioned his interest in carrying out an attack on an electrical substation that would “shock the system” and talked about accelerationism, a strain of white supremacist ideology that advocates hastening the collapse of society to lay the groundwork for a whites-only homeland.

“If you want to do the most damage as an accelerationist, attack high economic, high tax, political zones in every major metropolis,” Philippi allegedly texted the second informant.

Philippi’s arrest, which Jones dismissed as a “false flag alert” on his X account on Election Day, is only the most recent of at least half a dozen arrests by the FBI of accelerationists motivated by hatred of Black people, Jews, Muslims and LGBTQ+ people that Raw Story has tracked over the past year. The defendants are accused of planning infrastructure attacks, mass shootings and ambushes against law enforcement.

The arrests, including the two alleged leaders of the Terrorgram Collective, described by the FBI as “a transnational terrorist group,” reflect the agency’s aggressive and increasingly sophisticated effort — often using informants — to disrupt accelerationist terror plots.

“Protecting the American people from terrorism — both international and domestic — is the FBI’s top priority,” the FBI said in a statement to Raw Story. “In 2019, we elevated racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism to be the one of our top threat priorities and it has remained at that level.”

Alex Jones’ dismissal of the foiled Nashville substation attack as an FBI “false flag” represents a larger tendency within the MAGA movement to reflexively downplay domestic terrorism motivated by white supremacy, just as President-elect Donald Trump prepares to return to the White House and is reportedly preparing to replace current FBI Director Christopher Wray.

Neither Trump nor his Democratic opponent Kamala Harris raised domestic terrorism as a significant issue during the presidential campaign. Meanwhile, Trump and his allies relentlessly attacked the FBI and Department of Justice as the “Deep State” while promising to carry out retribution against officials involved in the multiple investigations against him and supporters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6.

Kash Patel, the MAGA loyalist Trump has announced as his pick for FBI director, previously served as chief of staff for the Department of Defense during the incoming president's first term and led a probe of the FBI's investigation into Russian interference during the 2016 campaign for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence

Trump and Patel have given little indication of whether he will support the FBI’s campaign to combat domestic terrorism, which has assessed violent extremism driven by a belief in white supremacy as being among the agency’s “highest priority threats.”

The Trump transition team and Patel did not respond to emails for this story.

Patel’s book Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy, published last year, devotes the first eight chapters to the FBI and the Department of Justice, but says little to nothing about domestic terrorism committed by white supremacists. The book only addresses domestic terrorism as a whole to argue that the FBI has exaggerated the problem for the purpose of unfairly maligning conservatives.

Patel, who prosecuted members of ISIS and al-Qaeda as a lawyer in the Department of Justice’s counterterrorism division from 2013 to 2017, writes in a chapter entitled “Made-Up Domestic Terrorism” that “to pump up public support for their attacks on conservative Americans, the FBI leadership has been reportedly pushing agents to artificially inflate data about domestic terrorism to make the problem seem much worse than it is.”

As a source for his claim, the footnote in Patel’s book cites a news article about a letter written by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), chair of the House Judiciary Committee, to Wray. Jordan wrote that a “whistleblower explained that because agents are not finding enough DVE cases, they are encouraged and incentivized to reclassify cases as DVE cases even though there is minimal, circumstantial evidence to support the reclassification.

White supremacist violence in first Trump administration

The FBI told Raw Story that “between 2015 and 2019, the most lethal threat posed by domestic violent extremism in the United States was from racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists driven by a belief in the superiority of the white race.”

Those years bookend the June 2015 massacre carried out by 21-year-old Dylann Roof at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C. that resulted in the deaths of nine African-American parishioners and the August 2019 mass shooting that targeted Latinos at an El Paso, Texas Walmart, taking the lives of 23 people.

The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security recognized 2019 as “the most lethal year for DVE attacks since 2015,” when Timothy McVeigh set off a bomb that at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people.

Shortly before 21-year-old Patrick Crusius opened fire at the Walmart in El Paso, gunman Patrick Crusius published a manifesto stating that his attack was “a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas,” using a word that directly echoed Trump’s claim during the 2018 mid-term elections that a Central American migrant caravan approach the southern border was “an invasion.”

The following day, Trump issued a formal statement from the Diplomatic Reception Room at the White House that addressed the manifesto, while omitting any mention of his rhetoric.

“In one voice, our nation must condemn racism, bigotry, and white supremacy,” Trump said.

“We must recognize that the internet has provided a dangerous avenue to radicalize disturbed minds and perform demented acts,” he added. “We must shine light on the dark recesses of the internet, and stop mass murders before they start.”

His condemnation of the El Paso massacre notwithstanding, Trump has only escalated his rhetoric against immigrants since 2019.

During the 2024 campaign, Trump likened migrants crossing the southern border to “a military invasion,” while claiming that the United States was being “conquered” and “occupied by a foreign element.”

In other respects, Crusius’ manifesto didn’t just echo Trump’s own rhetoric, but forecasted positions that would be adopted by Trump and the GOP at large years later.

Crusius wrote: “The Democrat party will own America and they know it. They have already begun the transition by pandering heavily to the Hispanic voting bloc in the 1^st Democratic Debate.”

Five years later, during his debate with Harris, Trump gestured towards his Democratic opponent, saying, “Our elections are bad, and a lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they’re trying to get them to vote.”

Tom Homan, whom Trump has named as his “border czar” during the next administration, made a similar false claim during a speech at the Rod of Iron Freedom Festival in Pennsylvania in October.

“Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are the first administration in the history of this nation who unsecured a border on purpose,” Homan said. “This isn’t an accident, this isn’t incompetence, this is by design, folks…. They obviously perceive a political advantage, thinking maybe they are future Democratic voters.”

A key reason for the enduring appeal of accelerationism — the white supremacist ideology repeatedly cited by the FBI in charging documents for disrupted terror plots — is dehumanizing narratives in the political and media discourse, said Matt Kriner, the managing director of the Accelerationist Research Consortium.

“What we’re seeing now is there’s a lot of discussion in the mainstream media around the ‘great replacement’ theory,” Kriner told Raw Story. “That’s a central component of their radicalization gateway. You get this swirling mix of terrorist propaganda and manifestos and mainstreamed narratives like the anti-Haitian conspiracy in Springfield, which creates a highly toxic and compelling radicalization environment.”

This is the first in a two-part series on the FBI's efforts to disrupt accelerationist terror plots as Donald Trump returns to power.

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As Americans flood the mail with holiday cards and gifts, their valuables and personal information remain at risk for theft due to internal bad actors and issues with deploying modernized technology, according to two recent reports from the United States Postal Service’s Office of Inspector General.

Thefts committed by U.S. Postal Service employees spiked to 1,790 closed cases in fiscal year 2023, and totaled 5,961 closed internal mail theft cases between October 1, 2019, and September 30, 2023, according to an Oct. 30 report.

The Office of Inspector General identified that inconsistent nationwide policies restricting personal belongings on workroom floors, nonfunctioning cameras, increased supervisor vacancies, and a lack of mail theft awareness training for employees contributed to the rising thefts.

“Employee mail theft damages the Postal Service’s reputation and diminishes public trust in the nation’s mail system. If the Postal Service does not have nationwide policies around what can be brought onto workroom floors and develop more robust training on mail theft awareness, there is a continued risk of internal mail theft occurring in processing facilities nationwide.,” the Oct. 30 report said. “Additionally, without ensuring there is adequate supervision on the workroom floor, employees will continue to have opportunities to steal checks, gift cards, narcotics and other items from the mailstream, and customers will not receive their mail.”

Robberies of letter carriers and mail receptacles by outside actors have also been an ongoing issue over the last five years, according to a Raw Story investigation that found a 543 percent increase in robberies of postal workers between 2019 and 2022 and an 87 percent increase in high-volume mail receptacle theft in the same three-year time period.

Experts estimate that the value of checks stolen from the mail totals nearly $100 million per month.

While the Postal Service “demonstrated” its commitment to improving mail security and carrier safety, its modernization efforts for mobile scanning devices and electronic locks, meant to better protect the mail and reduce the targeting of letter carriers for their keys, have fallen short, according to a Nov. 5 report.

The Postal Service reported the loss or theft of 1,936 of its real-time delivery scanning devices, some of which also open electronic locks, resulting in an undisclosed loss totaling millions of dollars. The Office of Inspector General estimates the total number of lost and stolen devices could total 7,209 nationwide, resulting in a further loss of millions of dollars (specific numbers were redacted from the report).

"The redacted monetary value is considered to be commercially sensitive to the Postal Service, which under good business practice would not be disclosed," Tara Linne, director of communications for the United States Postal Service’s Office of Inspector General, told Raw Story via email.

Other issues with the scanning devices include connectivity issues, insufficient training, inadequate battery oversight and limited deployment of features, according to the report.

In response to the spike in mail theft over the past few years, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy launched an initiative called “Project Safe Delivery” in May 2023 to better protect letter carriers with higher-security locks and mailboxes, increased accountability for arrow keys—universal keys that open mailboxes in a given zip code—and better law enforcement.

The initiative called for the replacement of 49,000 antiquated arrow locks — which is .5 percent of all 9 million arrow key locks nationwide. So far, 28,000 eLocks were installed as of March 2024, and the installation of 12,270 purchased eLocks were put on hold for various reasons, including installation wait-times, insufficient facility equipment and incompatible collection boxes, costing an undisclosed loss in the millions of dollars.

The Postal Service did not provide a specific plan for how it plans to install the eLocks on hold by the end of 2024, the report said.

"Here we go again," Frank Albergo, president of the Postal Police Officers Association, told Raw Story. "They had the same problem in 2020 with the antiquated locks that they weren't accounted for, and management controls were ineffective, and it seems the electronic locks, they're having the exact same issue."

The Postal Police Officers Association union has been embroiled in a four-year-long dispute with the Postal Service about its ability to protect letter carriers and the mail off postal property.

A second phase of the program to install another 50,000 eLocks was canceled and to be replaced with “a new lock capable of greater mail receptacle compatibility and less unlocking delay,” according to the Nov. 5 report. Further details about the new locks were not provided.

“The traditional arrow keys have been a target of thieves, looking to steal a key to gain access to collection boxes, as well as cluster boxes along a carrier’s route,” the Nov. 5 report said. “The eLocks provide a safer environment for postal employees to collect and deliver mail by eliminating the utility of a lone key for those looking to steal mail.”

The Office of the Inspector General also found that 14 of 15 facilities visited still used paper logbooks to keep track of its arrow keys.

“Arrow keys are specific target items involved in mail theft and carrier assaults; knowledge of unsecured arrow keys may cause the facility and its employees to become a target of theft or robbery,” the report continued. “The Postal Service risks a diminished reputation and public trust in the nation’s mail.”

Under DeJoy's leadership, the postal service has continued to face massive deficits, losing nearly $10 billion in the 2024 fiscal year ending in September. Last year's losses totaled $6.5 billion, CBS reported. Earlier this year, DeJoy paused his plans to consolidate postal service facilities until January amid mounting pressure from Congress.

The United States Postal Service and its law enforcement arm, the United States Postal Inspection Service, did not respond to Raw Story's request for comment, nor did the National Association of Letter Carriers and American Postal Workers Union.

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WASHINGTON, D.C. — Conservatives on Capitol Hill still aren’t sold on Speaker Mike Johnson.

While Johnson won the support of the House Republican Conference behind closed doors earlier this month, he’s still got to secure majority support on the floor of the House of Representatives on Jan. 3.

“The speaker's got work to do. He's got work to do,” a member of the far-right Freedom Caucus, who asked to remain anonymous so they could speak candidly, told Raw Story. “There are members who are thinking about whether they want to support him or not. He’s not there yet.”

With razor-thin margins in the House, a protest from even a handful of Republicans could cause a repeat of the start of the 118th Congress in which it took 15 votes for former Speaker Kevin McCarthy to secure the gavel.

While Johnson’s been spending more time with President-elect Donald Trump of late — including trips to Mar-a-Lago and attending a UFC fight with the former president — conservatives still aren’t convinced he’s the right GOP general to pass the party’s agenda.

“I wouldn't honestly put too much into that. I think that's just, you know, the president coming through on building goodwill with everybody, and I think that's a smart approach for him,” the Freedom Caucus member continued. “Honestly, I think it's more that members don't see somebody who's going to be strategic, make the right call, make timely calls.”

Former Freedom Caucus Chair Bob Good (R-VA) lost his primary this year, but as he heads for the exits, he’s encouraging his colleagues to replace Johnson.

“He’s been an abysmal failure,” Good told Raw Story. “Speaker Johnson has failed by every measuring stick, if you're a Republican, and so I think it would be a mistake to be voted in as speaker.”

Like many Freedom Caucus members, Good doesn’t have much respect for Johnson.

“Speaker Johnson will be a pawn and just do whatever he's told and whatever is in his best interest to be speaker. So he will do his best to be unified with President Trump's agenda, because he wants to be speaker,” Good said. “Unfortunately, what President Trump needs is a strong speaker, an effective speaker who can help drive his agenda through the House.”

This spring, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) joined Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) in her failed effort to oust Johnson by triggering a formal motion to vacate — the procedural measure used to oust McCarthy — but Johnson was saved by Democrats.

In the wake of Trump winning the popular vote and House Republicans just barely maintaining their majority, Massie says Johnson failed the GOP.

“He failed to increase our majority in an overwhelming red wave. He just made it tougher on himself, and the way he failed was not because he didn't campaign enough, but because we didn't get anything done,” Massie told Raw Story.

“So you're not happy with him and his record?” Raw Story pressed.

“Well, that would be an understatement,” Massie said.

“So will you oppose him on the floor?” Raw Story asked.

“I don't know. There’s a lot of time between now and then,” Massie said. “He's gonna have to do a 180 on a bunch of crap he shoved down our throats. Ukraine spending, for instance.”

Still, many of Trump’s biggest supporters in Congress say they’re following Trump’s lead.

“I think Mike Johnson has the support from President Trump,” Rep. Trey Nehls (R-TX) — while wearing a Trump tie — told Raw Story. “Everything that Trump pretty much says right now, we probably need to follow word for word.”

With Republicans readying to run the White House, Senate and the House in the new year, Nehls speaks for many in the GOP when he says challenging Johnson on the floor in January would be a strategic mistake.

“I just don't know how that's going to benefit us,” Nehls said. “This is what we have to do. Donald Trump's going to need four years to fix the screw-ups that we have in our country. Doing it in two years is going to be hard, and if we don't behave and follow some guidance and advice in the Trump first agenda, the America first agenda, we could lose the House in two years, and then what do we have then? Have to be careful about that.”

The other problem, yet again, facing the far-right wing of the GOP is that as united they are in their frustrations with Johnson, they still don’t have a potential replacement in mind — at least not one they’re rallying behind publicly.

“I’m not going to curse anybody by saying their name,” Massie said. “Anybody who I would want would not want me to say their name.”

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WASHINGTON – Republicans on Capitol Hill are privately celebrating after former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) withdrew his nomination for attorney general. Publicly, many won’t even say his name.

“So you don’t even want to talk about Matt Gaetz?” Raw Story asked the incoming chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee in a cramped Capitol elevator.

“You all are so smart,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) replied to Raw Story.

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Like most of his Republican colleagues, Graham changed his tune on President-elect Donald Trump in recent years. But, like many of his GOP colleagues, that didn’t mean he was going to cheerlead for Gaetz.

With Gaetz out, Senate Republicans – at least the 10-plus Raw Story interviewed at the Capitol on Thursday afternoon – are eager to move on.

“Are you shedding any tears?” Raw Story asked just off the Senate floor.

“No,” Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD) replied.

His Senate colleagues concur.

“If you got a non-Gaetz question, you’re first”

Since the nomination was announced, Senate Republicans have been inundated with Gaetz questions, so – even as he was the news of the day in Washington – they were eager to discuss anything but the man who was their party’s pariah throughout his four terms in Congress.

“If you got a non-Gaetz question, you’re first,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) told Raw Story.

“Interesting. So, you guys don't even want to talk about him anymore?” Raw Story asked. “You're happy to just move past him?”

“This is a process,” Tillis said.

“This was a short process, sir,” Raw Story said.

“I’d like to think of it as us demonstrating our efficiency,” Tillis quipped as he entered the Senate chamber.

According to CNN, Gaetz withdrew within an hour of the network asking the former congressman about a woman who said he engaged in sexual misconduct with her twice when she was a minor. The woman was 17 years old at the time and testified that the second sexual encounter, which only came to light Thursday, was a threesome with an adult woman.

The allegations didn't come as a shock to anyone on Capitol Hill, including Gaetz’s closest allies.

“I've known Matt Gaetz for a long time,” Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) told Raw Story on Monday. “I told him, I said, ‘Matt, I'm gonna vote for you, but if they prove something now, you're not gonna make it.’ He said, ‘Coach, I'm good. I've told the president, I'm good with this. They don't have anything.’”

Raw Story circled back with Tuberville after the latest allegations broke.

“You told me [Monday] that you had told Gaetz, ‘Hey, if stuff comes out, you're not gonna get it’ – do you know what stuff came out?” Raw Story asked.

“I don't know whether anything came out or he came up here and just didn't get a good feel to get confirmed,” Tuberville told Raw Story at the Capitol.

While Senate Republicans were light on details, many also didn’t care to stop and digest the latest in a string of Gaetz allegations.

Republican leaders are so over Gaetz questions

It’s not just the GOP rank-and-file. Steve Daines (R-MT), the outgoing chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee – who’s credited with helping the GOP win back the majority earlier this month – lavished lukewarm praise on Gaetz for bowing out.

“Is this good?” Raw Story asked.

“I respect this decision,” Daines replied.

“Was he a distraction for the agenda?” Raw Story pressed.

“I respect this decision,” Daines repeated as he walked onto the Senate floor.

Daines was not alone. Newly minted Senate Republican Leader John Thune (R-SD) didn’t even turn his head when Raw Story asked about Gaetz’s withdrawal.

The new GOP leader’s top general, Republican Whip John Barrasso (R-WY), seemed to have received the same memo.

“Are you glad that Gaetz is out?” Raw Story asked as someone bumped into the senator's aide, spilling the contents of her arms onto the marble hall.

“Your phone’s still on the ground — it’s still on the ground,” Barrasso told his staffer while breezing past Raw Story before turning to a reporter asking about Trump’s controversial secretary of defense nominee, Pete Hegseth of Fox and Friends Weekend fame.

“How did your meeting go with Hegseth?” the reporter asked of Hegseth, whose lawyer — to the surprise of Trump’s transition team — recently admitted the veteran settled a case with a woman who accused him of sexual assault seven years ago.

“Very productive meeting with the nominee,” Barrasso replied, ignoring Raw Story’s Gaetz question.

Gaetz may be gone, but the questions are far from over.

“He was not going to get confirmed”

A poor, haphazard vetting process seems to be plaguing Trump’s second term before he’s even officially back in the White House, but Republicans don’t want to discuss that as they try to portray a unified GOP heading into the New Year.

“Would you like it for the administration — or for the transition — to not pick someone who's accused of having sex with a minor for the next AG?” Raw Story asked one of Gaetz’s former Florida colleagues.

“So the — I can just tell you my experience with Matt was positive,” Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) told Raw Story. “I think Susie Wiles does a great job. I think Trump needs somebody that's going to do a good job, so I'm sure they'll go into it with the right mind.”

Democrats aren’t so sure, and they haven’t been since Trump dropped jaws with his initial Gaetz nomination.

“I told people that he would never make it through,” Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) told Raw Story while riding a Senate elevator. “And, obviously, he did not.”

While no one’s spiking the proverbial football, Democrats are breathing sighs of relief now that Gaetz is gone, for now at least.

“It was a smart call,” Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) told Raw Story while walking to the Capitol. “He was not going to get confirmed, so just make it easier on everybody.”

WASHINGTON — Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC) said former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) is "excited" about his U.S. Senate confirmation hearing despite damaging information that could come out about him stemming from a yearslong House Ethics Committee probe.

President-elect Donald Trump nominated Gaetz to lead the Justice Department in a flurry of appointments that included a Fox News weekend co-host for defense secretary and a governor with little experience in homeland security to head that department.

Speaking to Raw Story on Tuesday, Norman said he "expected" the attacks on Gaetz, but "he can handle himself."

"Can he?" Raw Story pressed.

"Yeah. He's excited," said Norman.

The Freedom Caucus Republican added that the House Ethics Committee report was "just an opinion they want to get out there." He anticipates it will "actually help" Gaetz.

"The public opinion is going to be with him," claimed Norman.

Norman dodged the question when asked about the accusations the Congressman paid for sex with a minor.

Gaetz has denied any wrongdoing.

"Look, they're after — they're gonna try and stop every one of 'em," he said. "Matt's just a poster child."

Fox weekend host Pete Hegseth has also been accused of sexual misconduct, which he also denies. In Hegseth's case, he asked the woman who accused him of sexual assault to sign a nondisclosure agreement and paid her an undisclosed sum. The police report that covers the accusation said a rape kit was done at the hospital and found evidence of a sexual encounter.

Hegseth claimed that they had sex, but it was consensual.

"It's not gonna work," Norman said about "going after" Gaetz. "They've been doing it for seven years."

The alleged encounters Gaetz had were during his first term in Congress between 2017 and 2019.

"I mean, some of the senators — I can't wait to see him get grilled," Norman said about Gaetz's confirmation process. "He can handle himself."

When Norman was asked about the Republicans who aren't fans of Gaetz, he said that some are still made aware of what happened to remove Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) from the chair.

"Let 'em leak it, and we'll see how it turns out," Norman closed.

An alleged hacker already accessed the information about Gaetz and could release it before the House does.

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